


Lightning in a Glass

by Weddersins



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Force Bond (Star Wars), POV Kylo Ren, Post TLJ, Rey is a sappy drunk, Reylo - Freeform, blanket tacos, but of course with a little angst because otherwise who am I really, canonverse, fluffy af, force bond visitiation, no juice on Jakku
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-03 03:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16754788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weddersins/pseuds/Weddersins
Summary: Kylo Ren is having a hard time sleeping. Rey is having a hard time staying awake.Inspired by the following prompt from the irreplaceableTourmalineGreen:"Force-users don't like to consume alcohol because it lowers mental shielding. Too bad the Resistance's entire supply of juice fermented. Better not let it go to waste. Meanwhile, Kylo Ren wakes up with Rey booping his nose and giggling. He is Very Confused."





	Lightning in a Glass

**Author's Note:**

> Brought to you by my child's seven-day-long-fever and the following prompt from [ TourmalineGreen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TourmalineGreen/pseuds/TourmalineGreen):
> 
> "Force-users don't like to consume alcohol because it lowers mental shielding. Too bad the Resistance's entire supply of juice fermented. Better not let it go to waste. Meanwhile, Kylo Ren wakes up with Rey booping his nose and giggling. He is Very Confused."
> 
> Many, many thanks to my excellent beta readers, [ theselittlethings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theselittlethings/pseuds/theselittlethings) and [ ibecomeaffinity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ibecomeaffinity/pseuds/ibecomeaffinity), whose input in invaluable.

Kylo rolled over in a half-woken haze, restless in the artificial night. The evening hums and whirrs of the Star Destroyer that usually accompanied his sleep were punctuated by a distant patternless clanging. He grumbled under his breath, unwilling to open his eyes and admit defeat. He didn’t want to look at the chrono, to mark the lonely hour he’d slept and watch the others slide into the past as he waited for the manufactured dawn. He didn’t want to think of the things he’d need to do once awake; the skin of the man he’d have to step into in order to maintain his tenuous grasp on the First Order. He didn’t want any of it.  
  
He just wanted to rest. But there was, as they say, no rest for the wicked - and there could be no doubt that his name was on that roster.

Grumbling away the self-recrimination, Kylo settled onto his back and tried to clear his mind. The river of Force that always welcomed him into slumber was burbling in the corner of his memory - and after a few moments of peace, he could return there.

But there was another loud clang, followed by a muted popping sound. Kylo resisted the urge to groan, biting his tongue and trying to return to sleep by sheer force of will. But still he slid further away from the elusive comfort of oblivion. The more aware he became, the more he was sure that the infernal clattering was what had awoken him.  
  
That was, until he surrendered fully and opened his eyes.  
  
Instead of the unbroken lines of tiles on his ceiling, freckled grey eyes met his groggy stare. The clanging noise faded into the gentle _thok_ of his chronometer speeding away the time. His heartbeat, previously slowed by sleep, now accelerated past the quieted marker of the time-keeper’s ticking.  
  
The Supreme Leader of the First Order was frozen in fear as she - her, _the girl_ \- gently tapped his nose with one finger, her face inches from his.

“Boop,” she whispered, mouth rounding to pop the “p” irreverently.  
  
_What_ , Kylo thought frantically, _the fuck._  
  
“Hi,” she said, a sideways smile dragging at her mouth. She tapped his nose once more.  
  
He launched himself from the bed without any semblance of conscious thought, elbow connecting with something _soft_ as he scrambled across the room. _Kriffing bloody hell dammit shit ass tit_ \- his thoughts descended into the profane as he thanked whatever deity would have him that he’d fallen asleep in his clothes instead of in the nude, as was his custom. He stood in the corner, sputtering incoherently as he tried to work out the _how_ and the _why_ .  
  
“Ouch!” She - her, the girl, _Rey_ \- whined petulantly from the bed, rubbing her chest as she settled herself tailor-fashion in the middle of his blanket. “Your arms are big. And heavy.”

The corners of her mouth tugged downward into an exaggerated pout, and she glared at him accusingly.  
  
His elbow tingled.  
  
A more polite man may have offered an apology, but all Kylo could do was stare at her - this smiling, loopy caricature of the girl he... never mind that, he stuffed _that_ thought away.  
  
Rey swayed and snorted before dissolving into a very strange laugh. Kylo began to worry that something had happened to her. This was not the girl he had known - something was different. A poison, perhaps? His anxious mind leapt into overdrive as he tried to rifle through the possibilities.

He hadn’t seen her since that day when the door had shut and she’d _left_ and he’d been careful, oh so careful, to never ever let her back in his head when she had so clearly wanted to leave - and now she was sitting on his bed, giggling and... was that a hiccup?  
  
“You’re drunk,” Kylo deadpanned, eyes narrowing as the realization dawned.  
  
Rey had the decency to look offended.

“‘Mm not,” she insisted, crossing her arms over her chest and listing slightly to the left.  
  
“You are,” Kylo said, completely unwilling to venture any closer to the bed. The buzz of worry was quickly fading, melting into a need to throw up walls and hide. “You are, because you would have never made it through my defenses otherwise.”  
  
At least he hoped the history he learned was true and alcohol was to blame. A larger part of him recognized he was simply vulnerable to her in a way that made him extremely uncomfortable to admit.  
  
“I could have done,” Rey replied with the false confidence of inebriation. “‘F I wanted.”

She raised an eyebrow in what was clearly an attempt to stare at him imperiously, but instead made her look a bit like a disgruntled porg.

“No,” Kylo muttered, mulling over words from a dusty page he read far away and long ago. “I don’t think so.”  
  
“Oh ye of little faith,” Rey stuttered, wobbling her finger at him from across the room.  
  
Historically speaking, drinking was not something Force-users tended to do - the breakdown of inhibitions often lead to a loss of control in all things, including their mental boundaries. Kylo opened his mouth to say this, but thought better of it as Rey leaned dangerously far to one side and almost lost her balance. Whether she’d cracked his shielding unintentionally or her inebriation snuck into their Bond and undid it from his side - it mattered not a bit.  
  
She was drunk - and now she was here.  
  
When Kylo’s eyes returned to the bed, he was surprised to find Rey flopped down on her back, arms stretched out to the sides. She was scowling at his ceiling.

“Not a very nice view.” She frowned for a moment before another giggle escaped, and Rey rolled over on her side to face him. She studied him for a moment, glassy eyes struggling to focus on his shape in the darkness across the room. “This one is better.”  
  
He blinked.

She rolled away from him, taking the corner of his blanket with her.

“Oh, this’s nice. Warmer. It’s kriffing cold in space - aren’t you cold? Issat why you always have so _much_ clothes on? Layers. Full of layers.” The last word was slightly muffled by the blanket, and stretched out with a drawl. She rolled over again, effectively cocooning herself in the blanket. “Cozy. But now I can’t see you.”  
  
Kylo blinked again, suddenly very uncomfortable and unsure what to do about it.

“Not that I could see you before now.” There was a hint of sadness in her lazy words that made him wince, but he pushed the feeling down and away like always.

 _You shut the door,_ he wanted to say. _I asked you to stay, and you left. And then you shut the door and you were gone and -_  
  
“The feeling will pass,” Kylo ventured, clearing his throat to dispel the awkwardness he felt. “You are clearly unused to alcohol. It’s no good for Force users, anyway. I’m surprised Lu- _Skywalker_ \- didn’t tell you that.”  
  
“Are you gon’tell me I need a teacher?” Rey laughed into her blanket-roll, a giddy noise that Kylo felt sure could be heard halfway down the hall.  
  
“Perhaps you do.”  
  
“Nope,” Rey said, popping the ‘p’ once more. “And s’not alcohol. Only juice.”  
  
“Juice does not do this.”  
  
“Wouldn’t know. Never had juice.”  
  
“Surely you’ve -“  
  
“No juice. You ever seen… fruit trees? On Jakku? No juice.”

Kylo relaxed slightly. The more she rambled, the more he realized there was no way Rey was going to remember any of this conversation the next morning.

“Only been on Jakku once,” he mused, remembering exactly the circumstances of his visit to the desert planet. “Didn’t have much time to look for fruit trees.”

“Woulda been a waste, ‘nyway. Nothin but sand. I hate sand. Can’t make anything from sand. No - can make glass. Lightning in the sand - makes glass. D’you know that? Lightning glass.”

“I did.” Kylo leaned against the wall, dropping his arms from across his chest to hang loosely at his sides. “Haven’t seen any myself.”

“Had some once.” Rey’s voice was quieting as she walked the halls of her memory. “Still do, ‘less’s been knicked. Don’t know.”

“Back on Jakku?”

“Back on Jakku.”

Kylo was struck with the irrational urge to retrieve it for her, and he almost scoffed aloud at the idiocy of the impulse. There was a long pause, where he could hear his heartbeat over the dull noise of the air circulating in the room.

Rey swallowed thickly. “I don’t feel well,” she hedged in a small voice.  
  
“I imagine not.”  
  
“It was a lot of juice.”  
  
“I see.”  
  
“I think it may have been a bit old, too.”  
  
“That’s generally how wine is made.”  
  
“Am I aller... aller...”  
  
“Allergic?”  
  
“Thass the one.”  
  
_No. Get drunk every night, and show up laughing in my bed. Please_ . “Yes. Horribly.”  
  
“That explains so much.”  
  
Silence fell again, punctured irregularly by soft hiccups.  
  
“Ben?” She whispered, and the desire to cross the room to her warred with the sound of his father’s voice echoing the syllable across eternity. “I can’t see you.”  
  
“That’s fine.”  
  
“No, s’not. Com’err.”  
  
He sighed. Surely, at this point, walking to the other side of the room wouldn’t matter. So he did, bare feet smacking quietly on the cold floor as he crossed the small space. He folded himself onto the floor, sitting awkwardly a meter away from his own bed.

“Closer,” Rey half-whined, her eyes sparkling from the dark of the blanket-cave.

“No.”

“Yerr no fun.”

“That’s true.”

“Bastard.”

“No, my parents were married.”

“Arse.”

“Now that _is_ accurate.”

“Come here.”

“Are you going to keep asking?”

“I’m persist… persist… persistent.”

“You’re annoying.”

“And you _like_ it.”

He remembered belatedly that with his careful mental blocks down there was every chance that Rey knew damn well that he _did_ like it. He said a silent prayer that his instincts were accurate and none of the knowledge she’d gleaned tonight would remain with her tomorrow.

With a sigh, Kylo slid across the cold floor till he was beside the bed, eye level with his mattress as a slow grin lit up her face. Rey freed one hand from her blanket tangle and reached out a finger to tap his nose again.

“Boop,” she said quietly, popping the ‘p’ very softly. He didn’t flinch away and Rey blinked furiously as her eyes began to slide closed.

“S’better,” Rey slurred, scrunching her nose as she smiled. She resettled into the blankets, tucking her arm closer to her chest.

Kylo grunted, wondering if he was going to need to bring her a wastebin.  
  
“Not ‘lone,” Rey muttered, “not now.”  
  
Kylo flushed, thankful that she couldn’t see it. “Go to sleep. Tomorrow, drink water and eat something meaty. No more juice.”  
  
“Got it,” she whispered, smiling hazily. “No more.”  
  
She stilled, shifting from wakefulness to sleep with an ease he envied. Kylo watched her, following the rise and fall of the blanket as she drew in breath, wondering when their link would close and she would vanish. When he was sure Rey was asleep, he exhaled mightily.

 _What_ , he thought again, _the fuck._

A part of him supposed that he should have used this opportunity to try and find out where the Resistance had gone to ground - what distant corner of the universe Rey was truly in. But he wouldn’t. Instead he studied her sleeping face, indulging his idle whim by counting the scatter of freckles across her nose placed there by a desert sun she’d long since left behind.

When there was no doubt in his mind that she was truly asleep in the deep river of Force, Kylo allowed himself to breathe the only question he’d wanted an answer to, knowing there would be no reply.

“Why did you leave?”

To his horror Rey stirred, once again freeing an arm from the straightjacket of blankets that could, in no way, be comfortable. “Couldn't stay. Didn’t want… that.”

“What did you want?” Kylo found the words spilling out of their own accord, fingers twitching with the effort of not grasping the slim hand that dangled in the space between them.

Rey opened her eyes for a moment, grey like a mackerel sky before a storm. She smiled lazily, lopsided and brazen with the alcohol dulling her senses. “You.”

He blinked in shock, taking a moment to right himself before replying.

“I couldn’t leave,” Kylo said softly, thinking back to the moment.

“You di’nt try,” she said, the smile fading briefly. “But… ‘m not done with you, yet. Ben Solo.”

Kylo sat back on his haunches, quite afraid his face was blank with surprise. She was drunk. She didn’t mean it. She’d left him, and it had been months -

As if she read his thoughts, Rey waggled a finger at him as she closed her eyes once more. “Not. Done.” Her arm fell limply in the space between them.

Kylo sat frozen for a long time, mulling over her words and replaying the moment of the saber snapping in half nearly a hundred times.

He must have dozed off, because he awoke with a jolt to the sound of a door slamming. His bed was empty, the top cover deflated in its tangled heap. She was gone - of course she was. If he hadn’t been on the floor, Kylo would have simply convinced himself it was a dream.

He hauled himself up with a grunt, stretching a stiff neck and rubbing the spot on his forehead where he had rested against the metal frame for too long. Shaggy black hair flopped into his eyes, and an annoyed breath puffed it away. The chronometer told him it was still the small hours of the morning - not time yet to fully wake.

Kylo flopped gracelessly onto the bed, not bothering to move the bedcover into a more comfortable position. He had hoped for some lingering memory of her, but there was none to be found. _Of course not,_ he thought with a derisive snort. _She was never here. And surely she will never remember… whatever that was._

But as he counted the ceiling tiles, his nose tingled. The cold corner of his mind where a tiny tickle had once lived had begun to warm. Kylo ceased his counting, and instead simply stared at the blank, grey ceiling with a bevy of thoughts swirling in his mind.

This time, the river of Force swallowed him swiftly. Kylo bobbed along in sleep’s oblivion, buoyed by the strange warmth of hope.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed! Come say hi to me on [ Twitter](https://twitter.com/weddersins).


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